Counseling

There are five stages of grief. God gives you eight gifts to get through them.

Grief can make you feel as if there is no way out. But before you give in, know that that is not true. Your loss and pain do not have the last word, Jesus does.

In Getting Through Grief for Youth: Eight Biblical Gifts for Living with Loss, young adults will look to the Word to wrestle and watch as God's promise to make all things new and His promise of life transform their hope.

Counselors have a high calling to love and care for people who are struggling in a fallen world. A wise biblical counselor draws out the deep attitudes of the heart and encourages their counselees toward growth into the image of Christ. Learning about specific problems, sharing Scripture, and sitting with suffering people are all important parts of counseling. While all of these elements are essential to the counseling task, counseling will ultimately fail without the simple yet vital skill of listening well.

In Learning to Listen, biblical counselor Joseph Hussung gives readers a theology of listening and explains the purpose, posture, and practice of this essential counseling skill. If counselors do not truly hear the hearts of their counselees, they won't understand the nuanced struggles at play nor how to apply biblical principles. Listening well enables counselors to love well and understand with empathy.

Just because mental health is discussed more today than ever, doesn't mean it's something new. Martin Luther's Letters of Spiritual Consolation cover issues like anxiety and depression as Luther advises his friends and family on their mental health.

When Christians struggle with their mental health, the first place they go is the church. Saunders equips pastors and church leaders with a resource on supporting their congregation with Scripture and medically-sound advice.

Luther's kind, compassionate, prescient advice is applicable to anyone under emotional distress. Pastors, teachers, and leaders alike will gain a greater understanding of and ability to support those struggling with their mental health.

12th Annual Outreach Resource of the Year

What is the church's role in suicide prevention?

While we tend to view the work of suicide prevention as the task of professional therapists and doctors, the church can also play a vital role. Studies show that religious faith is an important factor reducing the risk of suicide. Yet many pastors, chaplains and pastoral counselors feel overwhelmed and unprepared to prevent suicides.

In this practical handbook, psychologist Karen Mason equips ministry professionals to work with suicidal individuals. Integrating theology and psychology, she shows how pastoral caregivers can be agents of hope, teaching the significance of life, monitoring those at risk and intervening when they need help. Because church leaders are often present in people's lives in seasons of trouble and times of crisis, they can provide comfort in the midst of suffering and offer guidance for the future.

When our church members struggle in the darkness, the darkness need not overcome them. Discover how you and your church can be proactive in caring for those at risk of self-harm.

The Problem of Suffering is a superb resource to share and to use with anyone suffering any form of loss. It is honest, straightforward, expressive, evocative of much reflection and insight, and linked closely to the suffering Savior. Author Gregory Schulz speaks as a Christian father, sharing the very personal, difficult struggle of dealing with years of pain, suffering, and questions. As he shares his struggle, he bares his soul with a jarring honesty seldom heard in the church. His protest is against "God's abusive actions," and it rings true to anyone who's suffering of body or spirit.

Also included is an epilogue of prayers and poems written by sufferers.

From the Foreword

Warning: After you've read this book you'll never be the same again. You will be challenged by its intellectual depth, encouraged by its spiritual consolation, and blown away by its honesty. Like a roller-coaster, it will lift you to dizzying heights of insight, plunge you down into the deepest imaginable human pain, then lift you out again into hope.

Pain and suffering come in different sizes and intensities for different people, but they come inevitably to us all. A lot of ink has been spilled over the centuries on the so-called "problem of evil," but there's not much help in that. Anyone who has personally experienced the mind-numbing and gut-wrenching impact of suffering, pain, or loss can tell you the last thing anyone needs in the midst of that mess is intellectual reflection and explanation. What you need is the honest truth. And such honesty is rarely pleasant.